‘Misguided quixotism’ – that’s what Libby Purves, veteran BBC broadcaster, calls it. She’s talking about the way the BBC is going back over old episodes of shows like Dad’s Army and Steptoe and Son and editing out any politically incorrect bits. ““It’s actually refreshing to be made to cringe: it shows how far we have come, and makes anyone thoughtful wonder which current expressions will shock our grandchildren” she says.
This kind of airbrushing of the past drives me just a little bit crazy. Why stop with language? Why not censor the depiction of actions as well? We could have a history of the United States that skipped over the near-genocide of the native people and a history of Ireland where nobody told the English that the native people were just a bit hungry.
It has a long history, this sort of thing. In the eighteenth century, one Dr Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, which aimed to present the Bard of Avon with all the double-entendres and shocking violence removed. When I taught in Canada, there was a movement to remove Huckleberry Finn from the curriculum, since there was a character in it known as Nigger Jim. There was also a great deal of huffing and puffing about a character in a Philip Roth short story saying “fuck”. And of course the Catholic Church at one time painted bikinis onto naked women who appeared in great paintings.
Here in our own dear little stateen of NEI, we’re familiar with those who would ‘rewrite history’ – that is, people who would like to present the Troubles as a conflict where there were good guys (security forces) fighting bad guys (psychopathic terrorists). Change the past, we can’t stand it the way it is.
But because we don’t like the way people in the past talked or acted doesn’t mean that we’re entitled to put our thumb on the scales and see that things weigh out the way we want them to. Artists in the past produced art, drawing on the times in which they lived. People in the past spoke and acted as they saw fit, regardless of whether future generations like today’s might frown on those wards and deeds.
But to attempt to rearrange the bits of the past we don’t like, or to tinker with the art works produced in the past so they become more acceptable to our modern sensibilities – that’s the approach of people who know nothing about art and have a skewed view of human nature. And who then go looking for ways to force the rest of us to share their sad tight-arsedness.
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